A Caribbean-wide hackathon aimed at improving how artificial intelligence understands regional speech has highlighted the growing role of local data and talent in shaping global technology systems.
Zindi, a data science and AI competition platform focused on emerging markets, partnered with the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre to design and deliver the challenge. The winners were announced at the official launch of the centre in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, linking the competition to the opening of a new hub for applied AI research in the region.
The hackathon focused on automatic speech recognition, a branch of artificial intelligence that underpins voice assistants, transcription tools and customer support systems. While the technology is widely used around the world, it has often struggled to accurately understand Caribbean accents, limiting accessibility and reinforcing digital exclusion.
To address this, participants trained their models using a dataset of 28,000 manually transcribed audio clips from BBC Caribbean. Organisers said the aim was to show how locally relevant data, combined with regional expertise, could produce AI systems better suited to Caribbean linguistic and cultural contexts.
More than 40 teams from across the Caribbean took part in the competition, reflecting growing interest and technical capability in artificial intelligence across the region. The 10 highest ranked teams were invited to pitch practical applications of their models, including potential uses in education, financial services, agriculture and digital communication.
The Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre said it would open source the winning speech recognition models, allowing developers across the Caribbean to build on the work and adapt it for new use cases. The hackathon was supported by partners including CIBC, Infolytics and Data Axis.
“The launch of the AIIC represents a pivotal moment for artificial intelligence in the Caribbean,” said Craig Ramlal, Executive Director of the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre. “By partnering with Zindi to run this hackathon, we were able to tap into a broader regional community of technologists and apply AI to a problem that directly affects how we as Caribbean people can benefit from AI. This is exactly the kind of applied innovation the AIIC was created to support.”
“This partnership with AIIC shows what’s possible when you combine strong local leadership with a global AI innovation platform,” said Celina Lee, CEO and Co-Founder of Zindi. “There is no shortage of AI talent in the Caribbean. Our goal at Zindi is to provide the platform, data, and opportunities that allow that talent to shine and to build solutions that are grounded in local realities but have global relevance.”
The initiative also reflects Zindi’s expanding footprint beyond Africa and the Middle East, while pointing to the Caribbean’s growing visibility in the global artificial intelligence landscape.
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